A striking category of Mesoamerican sculpture has long invited comparison with the sky bearing Bacabs, though scholars are careful to keep the comparison provisional rather than settled. At both Chichen Itza in the Yucatan and Tula in central Mexico, Toltec and Maya-Toltec builders carved rows of standing stone figures, warriors with upraised arms, sometimes called Atlantean columns after the Greek Titan Atlas because of the obvious visual parallel, which were set beneath temple roofs and altars to appear as though physically supporting the structure above on their raised hands. The columns at Tula, in particular, are massive basalt warrior figures that once held up the roof of a temple platform, and the general idea they express, human or divine figures literally holding up the built or cosmic sky, maps naturally onto the directional, sky bearing role colonial sources assign to the four Bacabs, standing at the corners of the world with the sky resting on their shoulders.
Specialists in Mesoamerican archaeology generally decline to claim that the Tula or Chichen Itza column figures specifically depict the Bacabs by name, since no accompanying inscription identifies them and the two sites belong to Toltec and Maya-Toltec traditions rather than directly to the Yucatec Maya sources, chiefly Diego de Landa's account, that name the Bacabs themselves. What can be said more safely is that the underlying idea of sky supporting figures, quartering the ordered cosmos and holding its roof aloft, recurs independently in Mesoamerican sculpture, of which the Bacabs as described by Landa are one clearly named textual instance among a wider and older visual tradition of divine world-bearers.